Work-work-work! After being late--not just late, but OHMIGOD I'm SO late!!!--this morning, I'm making up for it with a furious stretch of productivity. Uploading, downloading, creating, editing, reading, and even thinking.
At the moment, my thoughts are wandering around the question of how Dynamic Keyword Insertion can help us target low-traffic, high-profit niche and vertical markets, but that's probably not of general interest to my exclusive and intelligent readership, so I won't bore you.
I've been browsing my way through a couple of the certification programs I'm planning to qualify for and, quite surprisingly, learning a lot in the process. For instance, I discovered that the dedicated Webnetter "rep" who introduced us to the concept of DKI explained it quite incorrectly. At least, I'm choosing to decide it was her. My other option is to assume that Gidget listened and got it wrong. Experience suggests a 50/50 probability between those options. Anyhow, I have to edit 2000 ads between now and the end of the month. To make my life easy, I'm thinking I'll edit them in bulk, offline, and then do a mass "delete the old, upload the new" change the afternoon of the last day of this month. That will give me clean data on both sets of ads.
Last night, the diet sailed not just out the window, but down the river, out to sea, and over the horizon. Regrettable since it was a business dinner, not a private pig-out with friends, but there you go. It's fortunate I'm not ambitious in business since given a choice between goodie-starved taste-buds and a chance to impress new colleagues with my professionalism and restraint, my taste-buds will win every time. You know how it goes--I can resist everything but temptation.
An hour before bedtime I took not one, but two sleeping pills. I turned in early, was out like a light less than 30 minutes later, and still overslept this morning. I don't know how often I hit the snooze button, but I know that the first time I raised my head to squint at the clock, it said, 7:59. *Sigh.* I need to find a sleeping aid that doesn't contain pain relievers so I dare to take it more than once or twice a week when the weather is so hot and muggy.
We did get a storm last night. Finally, after a week of clouds massing up every afternoon and the humidity climbing rapidly, only to dissipate without result. Rain pouring! Wind whooshing! Temperature dropping! It didn't last long but I was grateful for every lost degree of heat. That might have contributed to my unusual 9-hour stretch of somnia. (Insomnia is a word, so "somnia" should be intelligible to all of you.)
I really am feeling perky today. Not just perky--positively enthusiastic!
I had a whole, whiny entry written about last week's 'NutNews issue, but I didn't get it posted on Friday and I'm over it.
I'm Social Girl this week. There's a rumor I'm slated to lunch with the training class for new 'nuts today. Meeting friends for coffee, snacks, knitting, and gossip tonight. Tomorrow evening is dinner with the department. Apparently* one of the four** of us lives and works remotely and isn't in town often. Since he's here this week, there's a command performance for dinner-and-bonding. Two events! Both on school nights! (How old do you have to get before you stop thinking of weekday evenings as "school" nights?)
The diet, for anyone remotely interested, is not going well. I lost focus a couple of weeks ago and on Saturday I declared myself officially "off" the diet. I've had enough junk food in the last three days to make me sick for a year, so as soon as I get back to the grocery store (Thursday), I'm buying more expensive, ready-to-eat turkey (ick) and starting again. Still 4 lbs down, still 6 lbs to go.
With the arrival of summer, I've stopped sleeping at all well. Back to 1-2 hours of laying awake before I drop off and back to waking up several times a week. If getting old means never getting another good night's sleep, I don't want to play.
I should be working, shouldn't I? But I'm not.
Later that same decade....
I'm offended. Human nature being what it is, while I didn't want to have to sit and eat cold sandwiches and make nice to this week's crop of 'Nut trainees, I'm grossly offended by the discovery that 70% of the office is lunching with them today, but I'm not included. The entire sales department is at lunch and no one seems to care that their phones are ringing off the hook.
Bunny update
Baby bunnies are swarming. I see at least one every time I leave the building. I think their parents are about to kick them out of the Bunny Home, though. On this last trip out, I saw one older bunny laying in the shade of a bush. She was sprawled out on her back, little bunny paws waving in the cool breeze. A little Me Time for mom.
/Bunny Update
And, speaking of sleep problems (we were, some time ago, remember?), I think I'm starting to pay the price in nonfunctioning brain cells. This morning, my alarm went off and I sprang out of bed--for the first time in over a week. I puttered around--brushing the teeth, washing the face, combing the hair, daubing the contents of various pots and bottles here and there, and discovered, with some satisfaction, that I had 35 minutes left to make the 10-minute commute to my office. I was about to be on time for a change!
As I gathered up my purse and my little lunch bag, vague thought of some task left undone nagged at me. I ran back over the list. Teeth? Brushed. Make-up? Daubed. Deodorant? Applied. Hair? Combed.
But...wait! Hair? Combed? What happened to drying and styling it?
Yes, dear readers, I did everything I needed to do to get ready for the day except take a shower.
Sigh. In the end, I was only ten minutes late to the office. Thank goodness for the new, shorter 'do that only takes 5 minutes to style.
I swear, if I hadn't had plans for after work today, I'd have just come in as I was--all grungy and grimy with the dirt of the last 24 hours all over me.
Yes, I should be working. But I pounded out so much work last Friday and yesterday, to make up for being distracted by the 'NutNews for three days last week, that I'm once again at the point where I have to let all of the accounts 'rest' for a couple of days so I can evaluate the results of my most recent changes. I guess there's such a thing as being too efficient on the job.
Yrgshrfm!
I smushed my finger in a drawer. Waitaminnit-I have to go deal with the bloodshed....
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* Okay, well, not so much 'apparently' because I know he's not a local employee. It's just that even though I've met him before, no one ever said what his job was, so I didn't realize he was a member of our little department. I knew Penelope was, but not this guy, although I didn't know Penelope was until she was leaving and they asked me to take on half her job.
** Yes, still four. The last I heard, they're now hoping to have a new person hired and on board before the end of the summer. It's a good thing I'm experienced in Management-Speak and didn't take their "can you take of half of Penelope's job but it's only for three weeks" statement that seriously.
Do you know you can customize Google?
I did. I have iGoogle. I chose a theme and added gadgets and tabs.
When I bring up my iGoogle, I see Astro Boy (I just love him) and I get the date, time, and weather (currently 94 degrees and, at 11% humidity, everyone's complaining about how sticky it is) in Denver.
I also have a sticky note gadget, so I can write myself online post-it note reminders. It usually says, "Send chocolate."
I have a news tab with a handful of international news sites. I can skim the titles of the opinion columns on the NYTimes in WaPo every morning, so see if anyone is complaining about anything I'm interested in.
I have a humor tab for when I'm feeling in need of a lift. I can click through to see what Calvin and Hobbes are up to, read the latest Doonesbury, or see what Chimp-o-Matic has to offer.* I have a virtual panda bear pet to feed.
In fact, it's so much fun that finally, after 15 years of surfing the 'net, finally I've found something I like well enough to use it as my "home page." No longer does my browser window show blank when I open it! I have stuff to look at!**
In short, there are no limits to the ways I've found to not work on company time.
Sigh. I don't want to start anything time-consuming or major. Vela's supposed to be sending me the data files for the 'NutNews. In fact, she was supposed to have them ready for me first thing on Monday morning. It's Tuesday afternoon, after 3:00 now.
Problem is, I've been dinking around with small tasks for most of the day in the expectation that she was going to show up with an armload of newsletter content any moment. By now, I'm bored. Bored out of my gourd. Bored and being ignored. (Ed. Pull yourself together.)
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* At the moment?
Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment. --George W. Bush (01/14/2001)
And there are people who think this man is not an idiot?
** The R.C. mocks me frequently because I don't change my wallpaper or have a "home page" on my browser. I figure, when I sit down at a computer, I have a lot more to do than to admire whatever background picture might be there. And when I go online, I could be in any kind of mood. I don't want to have to wait for some page I don't care about today to load up.
Why am I getting comments on my occasional posts on the politiblog? The thing's been dormant for years. No one should be checking it.
Why, when an office looks around at their staff to choose people to handle lunchtime relief for the receptionist, why are none of the people ever chosen male?
Why is that man out in the atrium whacking great chunks out of the trees with giant pruning shears? What did the trees ever do to him?
Why is there an invisible person somewhere close by, using a drill or electric screwdriver? I can hear it plainly from my desk but can't find it when I walk around and look for it.
Why are people ridiculously superstitious? Grace, over in the National 'Nuts department, was telling someone last Friday how she'd ridden her bike to work. She didn't drive her car because she was afraid of having bad luck on Friday the 13th. To the best of my knowledge, you're a heckuva lot more likely to get run over on DTC Boulevard if you're on a bicycle than if you're in a car, so, superstition around random dates: stupid; and riding a bike to avoid an accident: asking for trouble.
Why don't writers know when to quit? When the mood is gone, when inspiration is failing you, and when you don't really have anything left to say in your fictional universe--why don't you just quit? Why beat the tattered dregs of your good idea into a pulp until even the original, inspired stories begin to suffer by proximity? (Of, if you must write dreck, why can't you keep it to yourself? Do you know that you've ruined my enthusiasm for your first stories and that I'll probably never again be able to read them?)
Why does it take people two days to do a two-minute project? This week, I told Vela to let me do the 'NutNews editing. I edited every article for this issue in less than 30 minutes. The last couple of times, I've had to wait two days for everyone to get around to doing their editing, and most of them are only editing one or two articles per issue.
Why do I spend so much time complaining about the additional projects I've been given here at the Argonut Café when clearly I continue to have lots of free time on my hands for blogging?
Why does the human body crave massive injections of fatty food when the stuff isn't good for it? For the last week, I haven't been able to think about anything but Mexican food.* Why does the body crave what's not good for it? I know that refined sugar does something chemical in the brain and I'm assuming fat does something similar, but why? It's hardly survival-oriented.** (I guess it's possible that nature has decided that our species is so stupid and so destructive that the sooner we do ourselves in, the better.**)
I made a humongous credit card payment today. Can take the money left in my checking account and indulge myself in an armload of new books as a reward?
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* Well, okay, I was obsessing about pancakes but I got those Saturday morning. So it's Mexican food now.
** I have moods.
I'm getting better known here at the Argonut café. I'm not sure that's a good thing. I rather object to people interrupting my work day with requests to do time-wasting things like emailing someone 60 files because she's working at home and forgot to take a CD with her. Or getting IMs asking me to walk over and ask someone something, when the person could just as easily have IMd the person they wanted to talk to. Or getting more IMs asking if Gidget is in the office, from people too lazy to walk the 30 steps to her desk to see for themselves or, even simpler, pick up the phone and dial her extension.
On the good news (or at least "fun things") side of the equation, I've now been here for long enough that I'm moving past the daily tasks (i.e., "work") and onto more strategic (i.e., "dinking around") thinking.
This morning I wrote a 4 page document describing the three major online marketing programs we work with, identifying features unique to each of them and describing what we use them for. No one asked me for it and no one will ever care, but I always write documents because they organize my thoughts.
Mind you, I don't use all of those features. Some of them are new, some of them I haven't had time to experiment with yet, and some of them I didn’t know existed before I went poking around today. But I will be using them. One of the advantages of sitting down and writing up things you don't know about is that you're forced to learn about them. There are some fairly cool (if time-consuming) tools that I plan to play with work on over the next month. And there are other things, things I did because Gidget said to do them and to do them that way--now I'm thinking some of them might not be getting the results we want.
Certifications are available for some of the programs we use and I'm rapidly qualifying.
(Yes! I'm almost certifiable!)
Before I get sidetracked, I need to figure out how to document what I'm doing. I'm big on documentation, of course. I mean, first, sitting around and writing about stuff aimlessly, and, second, colored charts! (Also I gotta track what I do so if I break it I can fix it.)
I've been holding off on some tools previously available because I wanted to wait until the Next Level Plan was approved and we were getting things underway. Some of what I've found has the potential to significantly improve our marketing tracking and our traffic. I wanted implementation of those things to be something we could brag about in the NLP Results So Far reports.
That's not some kind of spitefulness. I've already made a lot of changes and improvements in the last four months and then, in the last month, I've had to carve out 25% of my time to do the ArgonutNews and all of the associated whatnot around it.
It's a mistake to be too productive, especially when you've been piled with extra work that's supposedly temporary. Do too good at coping and management will immediately decide to make the temporary assignment permanent.
Speaking of the 'NutNews, though, I've convinced Vela, my own personal ChaosManager, that paying a modest fee to use an email design-and-bulk-send service is a good idea. I did some research the other day (I love this job) and picked out the one I liked. They offer a free trial, so I'll have to spend some time messing around with it (so sad) over the next week.
Wow, that was boring and All About Me.
As a reward for reading through all of that (or at least skimming down the entire entry), I offer Google Trends. Who cares about what interests you today? What is everyone talking about? What's hot, what's spicy, and what's cold and empty? And when does "Whitewater Investigation" not come with the name "Clinton" attached? Check out what's trending.
If that's too complicated, take yourself over to Ask 500 People and respond to a few polls.
If you're just hard up for something to read, anything, well, I usually visit bharatbhasha when I feel that way.
I know you're not all fans of media fandom. :) Some of you have little or no sympathy for those of us who have some hobbies that center around television and movies.
I've had discussions with people who feel, for instance, that there's a major difference between gathering around the water cooler and discussing what kind of planned-and-canned shenanigans characters got up to on a pretends-to-be-reality show last night, but infinitely loser-like to discuss the character development on an unashamedly fictional program that went off the air two years ago.
At this moment I'm torn between going off on a digression about ephemeral culture, something I mentioned briefly a couple of posts ago, and the desire to stay on track (for once).*
Anyhow.
One of the battles that media fandom faces is the possibility of lawsuits over copyright infringement.
All fandoms face copyright issues, but the matter is much more clear-cut in scrapbooking fandom (someone made the image, so they own it) or plagiarism cases (you published those 5,000 words last year, then the identical words appeared on her website last month). Issues are not so clear in knitting fandom (someone created the pattern, but you could easily recreate the identical pattern on your own, so there are gray areas), or amateur chef fandom (ditto for recipes--prove I didn't make up that recipe for chicken cordon bleu all on my own!).
But people who play fantasy sports are immune from copyright infringement. After all, it's just a game of a game and nothing they're using belongs to anyone else, if you lay aside the frequent bandying of team names, league names, and/or player names. That's the law.
A kind of triumph for free speech for all of us, don't you think?
I mean, I'm not all that sure about the citation that fantasy leagues are okay because discussing sports is of "substantial public interest" or whatever they said. Sounds to me like there might have been a flaw in the wording of the lawsuit or something.
On the other hand, for every million people who want to talk about how the Yankees are doing this year, only twelve losers want to talk about them in terms of fantasy baseball team performance so fantasy leagues aren't precisely interesting to a "substantial" number of people, but that's all to the good for those of us involved in media fandom, because if a million people are talking about what happened on Supernatural's season-ender but only twelve people are 'talking' about it in terms of mix-and-matching events (fantasy media viewing!) to suit themselves, then they'd be covered under the same ruling.
In recent years, corporations have been aggressively pushing the bounds of intellectual property — extending the length of copyrights to unreasonable lengths, for example, and patenting seeds. In the case of fantasy baseball, the courts have rightly cried foul.
And genes. They're patenting our genes, don't forget. I have never understood how someone could legally lay claim to a gene, something in wide public use that's in the public interest to leave in the public domain. What's next? Levying tribute on all newborns for daring to use patented material?
The biggest fantasy in this case was Major League Baseball’s claim that its fans should pay to talk about the game.
Non-media fans are agreeing with that sentence. How insane, to think you can charge people for what they say?*
Drat. After all that, I forgot where I was going with this. Except to say that I'm sure the fantasy football nuts would be freaked out to realize how much they have in common with the media geeks who talk tv.
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* I'll confine myself to saying that discussing drama--what rings true and what doesn't in popular entertainment and what it says about us as human beings and about the society that produces the entertainment--discussing drama and human nature seems to me to be a much more intelligent use of time than debating whether or not some would-be actor could have swung on a rope over a pit if he hadn't been blindfolded or whatever idiotic shenanigans they get up to on those not-at-all-reality programs none of which, I'm proud to say, I've even seen as much as five minutes of. (stops to breathe)
**Another digression successfully avoided--words can be copyrighted, so why can't you charge someone for saying "New York Yankees" or "Boston Red Sox"?
The Argonut newsletter, end of month reporting, a major addition to all 35 advertising campaigns that Gidget requested 2 weeks ago and that I haven't been able to complete yet, various meetings, and, oh, yes, my real job.
Mentally, I'm sitting here whining about how hard I had to work this week. I should be ashamed--in the past I've had much more stressful jobs with many more ridiculous tasks to be completed than what I've been doing this week.
Still.
As Gidget and I were just saying to each other, it's a good thing we got paid today. This was a very good week for them to remind us that they give us money for putting up with them.
Other than that, it's Friday, so I'm fairly cheerful. I've gotten 8 of the 35 updates loaded this morning and have hopes of getting the others completed by the end of the day.
No particular attitude today. I haven't had the leisure to develop one this week, so a handful of random links.
From a local news site:
"The right lane of westbound I-70 near Siverthorne[sic] is closed due to a sinkhole measuring six feet wide by four feet deep. Crews are working to assess the damage and make repairs."
That's not Colorado's first sinkhole in recent years. "Aging infrastructure" is right. It's not just aging, it's all crumbling to dust.
As is our democracy.
US to tighten visa restrictions Which is bad enough, but if you don't need a visa to come to the USofA, you have to "register" only now they want you to do it in advance, instead of upon arrival, so they can put you in their database of potential terrorists check you out before you get here.
But that's not the best of it. The best part is, the disclosure request:
A Homeland Security spokesman said the new registrations would require the same information as the I-94 card, which is currently filled out by visitors to the US and turned in to customs on arrival in the country.That information includes passport number, country of residence, and any involvement in terror activities.
Wasn't there something about not requiring people to self-incriminate in that Constitution thingy we used to have?
But, now that I think about it, we sort of decided that "all men are created equal" wasn't to be taken too seriously, didn't we?
More a greeting-card democracy than an actual gift.
Egypt uncovers 'missing' pyramid of a pharaoh So cool.
Best writing/grammar site I've found in ages: DailyWritingTips. Work checking out for this verb post alone.
Or maybe it's supposed to be tweets? I've been playing with this thing called Twitter for the last few days. More or less legitimately, since I'm "investigating" social networking as part of my job.
It's a bit schizophrenic. I'm restricted to 140 characters or less per "tweet," which lends itself to silly remarks posted frequently. But I'm uncomfortably aware that if someone "follows" me, they might be receiving my messages as txt on their cell phones--meaning, they might be paying to read my babble. So I shouldn't post unless I'm actually saying something. As we all know, I don't often have Something to say.
I'm "following" (that's what it's called when you subscribe to someone's posts) two people. A stranger I added when I was experimenting with the interface originally and one familiar name who somehow found and "followed" me.
I'm also LinkedIn (under my Other Real Name), but that's less entertaining. As a "professional networking" site, it just sort of sits there. I guess I should look at it as "low maintenance."
I don't know. I already have this blog to keep up and then there's the other journal, not to mention all of the writing I'm doing at work (right now: a manual for putting out the ArgonutNews, the stupid newsletter itself, although more editing than writing, and web pages for Gidget*). Not that all of that added together makes a significant amount of writing, but the diversity in subject matter is keeping my brain spinning. I'm habitually behind on my email any more. I'm finally getting back to reading Bloglines on a regular basis, but haven't yet gotten back into the habit of commenting on posts.
I don't know that I should be taking on anything else at the moment. I mean, I'm pretty much failing at everything I already have underway, you know?
Gidget is working with a friend to write a book. On marketing or something, I'm not sure. (No doubt I'll wind up doing some gratis editing, so I'll know eventually.) For a second, as I typed that first sentence, the urge came over me to write a book but having produced near-book length stories already, I am firmly remembering that Real Writing would be even more work than that.
Also, if you're going to write a book you should have Something to say. Sigh.
I could write a gimmick book, like that person who wrote the one about the "secret." That was, what, twenty pages long? Or less? But it caught the public imagination and I'd guess he made a pretty penny on it.
I like pretty pennies.
OTOH I'm not really that interested in making money writing. I'd rather (assuming I ever get back to writing again) have fun (inasmuch as it's possible to have "fun" when writing, which is a singularly painful and consuming pastime) than work. I miss the days when all it took was putting my fingers on a keyboard to trigger a massive outpouring of text. It may not have been good, but it sure was easy.
I'm boring you on the subject of working today because The Novel is back in my mind. Not in a "write this down" kind of way or anything, but I occasionally ponder the Alternate Universe I created when I first conceived of the idea and then I want to go back to my files and hand-drawn maps and flesh out the world. I still have a ton of climate research to do, to make sure I've structured the ecologies of the various parts of the world correctly. I need to know more about what climates to choose for what kinds of plants, I need to know more about kinds of wood, and to read up on wind patterns and how they're formed. Heh. A ton of useless research. What fun!
I finally remembered to bring in a fan for my cubicle today and it's gray and rainy and very cool inside.
Lunch break over.
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* This is why I don't like writing for other people. I rewrote five pages, just in draft form, but enough to give her a feel for the punchier, more sales-oriented approach I thought she might want to take. Now she's going to go ahead and put them up as her first website, under the theory that she can "massage" the content later and it's more important to have the website up immediately.
She's a marketing professional! How can she think, "fast but not that good" is good enough? Why, when with a few days of thought, planning, and rewriting, she could have a good website, is she so determined to go ahead with a now website? And I have no control--it's her project and I was just doing her a favor, so it's out of my hands.
No one wants to do it right any more. It's a cultural failing in this country. We'll take whatever we can get, as long as we can get it now. Instant gratification is more important than gratifying gratification or something.